


Beyond the Sea

by scullywolf



Series: TXF: Scenes in Between [13]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Introspection, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-25
Updated: 2015-07-25
Packaged: 2018-04-11 04:00:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4420499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scullywolf/pseuds/scullywolf





	Beyond the Sea

_“You come for some unfinished business. You want your father’s message. Not now. Be there tonight, my witness. And when they got me in that chair and they… open up that shield… you get your message.”_

She drove away from the prison fully intending to return later that evening, to take Boggs up on his offer. To hear whatever message he may have been able to pass along from the other side of death…

Yet as she drove, as she imagined how that scenario might play out, she recognized in herself an unexpectedly strong, and negative, visceral reaction. Her stomach clenched with something much more like dread than like hope, more like fear than like anticipation. By the time she arrived at the hospital, she was significantly less confident that witnessing Boggs’s execution was such a good idea after all.

When she got to Mulder’s room, she felt her shoulders relax and the knot in her stomach start to loosen. He was off oxygen, sitting up and looking miles better than he had, even 24 hours earlier. She wasn’t going to lose him, too.

He smiled as she entered the room. “Hey, I heard you found them. Jim Summers is expected to make a full recovery. You did good work, Dana, especially considering the circumstances. I know this was a tough one for you.”

The sympathy and pride in his eyes nearly undid her, and she didn’t trust herself to speak for a few moments as she looked around for a chair; not finding one, she sat on the end of his bed. When she finally met his eyes again, they were filled with concern, instead. She took a breath.

“There are some things I haven’t told you.”

She unloaded, then, everything she had been holding inside herself for days. The vision in her apartment, the funeral, how while her father’s ashes were scattered into the sea, they’d played a song she heard Luther Boggs sing not 6 hours later. Her subsequent visions or hallucinations or whatever they were, both in the jail and at the motel. Her  _guilt_  over trying to bargain for the life of a convicted serial killer, all for the promise of a final conversation with her father.

Boggs’s last offer, when those bargaining efforts had failed.

It was cathartic, working through everything out loud, and Scully was surprised to realize that verbalizing everything had also served to demystify it somewhat, for her. She could take a step back and see the places where she had maybe been too quick to believe, where her grief and exhaustion had clouded her ability to rationalize. Even the things she’d thought she’d seen -- there were neurological explanations, psychological ones. The paranormal didn’t even have to enter into it.

Through it all, Mulder was silent, only speaking again once she had finished.

“I wish I’d known.”

She shrugged and shifted, angling her body away from him. “You seemed so certain that he was a fraud. And I… I just wasn’t certain about anything. I’m still not.”

She was quiet again for a while, contemplating the potential series of events that could have even explained everything she’d thought she’d seen Boggs do. He had only contacted Mulder after Scully’s father’s obituary had appeared in the Washington Post. If Boggs had been following Mulder’s career, he would have known that Scully was his partner, might have suspected that even if Mulder would see though his channeling act, Scully would be vulnerable. An easy mark. After that, it would only take a bit of research…

“Hey, you okay?”


End file.
